Modeling Business Processes |
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The Process Platform business process modeling environment offers an intuitive modeling environment in which you can model your business processes using the BPMN constructs. The BPMN constructs help you to quickly and easily model business processes. It also facilitates the expressiveness to model complex business processes and can naturally be mapped to business process execution languages.
To model a business process flow using Cordys, you can begin with modeling the events that occur to start a process, the processes that get performed and the end results of the process flow. Business decisions and branching of flows is modeled using decision cases and flow connectors. Also, a process in the flow can contain sub-processes which are graphically depicted by another business process diagram via a hyperlink to a process symbol.
Using Flow Connectors and Message Maps
At the core of business process modeling are the tasks themselves. There are three types of tasks:
- the process
- the sub-process
- the tasks
Each of these tasks is graphically depicted by use of different symbols to reflect the hierarchical relationships between them. To show the order of execution of tasks, connect them with flow connectors. Decisions, merges, forks and joins in the process flow are modeled using decision cases and the flow connectors. A decision can be thought of as a question that is asked at a point in the process flow.
Processes transform data in your organization. You can model how data is transformed during process flow using message maps.
Using Swimlanes and Modeling Events
Modeling business processes involves a large number of people and associated events that are responsible for the working of the processes. The Process Platform business process model editor enables you to specify 'who does what' by placing the events and processes into shaded areas called pools that denote who is performing a process. You can sectionalize these pools into swimlanes. A pool typically represents an organization and a swimlane typically represents a department within that organization (a swimlane can also represent other things such as functions, applications and systems). A pool is drawn as a rectangular region horizontally across or vertically down the diagram. A swimlane is a sub-partition within a pool and extends the entire length of the pool. By taking processes and placing them in pools or lanes, you specify 'who' does 'what', for events you specify 'where' they occur, and for decisions you specify 'where' decisions are made and 'who' makes them.
Often events occur while a particular process is being performed, causing an interrupt to the process, and triggering a new process to be performed. You can model these intermediate events directly on the process activity that it is associated with.
In an end-to-end value chain, organizations and individuals want to pick best-of- breed components that provide value chain the best value. You can accomplish this using Process Platform to ensure that applications and Web services work together in harmony through orchestrating services. Process Platform provides a powerful augmentation to modeling techniques such as application and system design with the support of BPMN and BPML.
Using the Tabs on the Business Process Model Editor
The business process model editor in Process Platform provides the following tab views:
- Model: This tab view appears by default whenever you open the business process model editor. Alternatively, click this tab to model a business process and do all your design time activities.
- Message Map: Click this tab to create and view the message map for your business process models or the message map for any activity residing within a business process model.
- Business Logging: Click this tab to enable logging for desired activities within the modeled business process. An activity can have multiple entries of nature information, critical or error. Define them at the level of various events associated with the model.
- Message Filter: At the time of using Process Platform BAM when you want to monitor a process and its activities based only on specific messages, click the Message Filter tab to configure message filters. You can configure message filters only for process specific messages and activities such as Task, Web service, Independent Sub-process, Decision Table and Receive Message, if they exist for the business process.
Some of the high level tasks that you can perform using Process Platform business process model editor are: